The One You Feed - Tim Urban: Wait but Why

Episode Date: September 21, 2017

Tim Urban writes a pretty famous blog called Wait But Why - have you read it? Whether you have or you've never heard of it before, this episode will not only thoroughly entertain you but it will also help you implement a playful yet powerful approach to ending procrastination and augmenting your productivity on a daily basis. When it comes to things like building habits or mindfulness about your moment to moment tasks, nothing helps your self-confidence more than following through on something you told yourself or others that you were going to do. In this episode, Time Urban teaches you lots of hacks to do just that and you'll chuckle a lot along the way. Get ready to meet these cast of characters: the rational decision maker, the instant gratification monkey, and the panic monster.   This week we talk to Tim Urban Tim Urban has become one of the Internet’s most popular writers. With wry stick-figure illustrations and occasionally epic prose on everything from procrastination to artificial intelligence, Urban's blog, Wait But Why, has garnered millions of unique page views, thousands of patrons and famous fans like Elon Musk   His recent Ted talk has been watched almost 15 million times. His articles have been regularly republished on sites like Quartz, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, TIME, Business Insider and Gizmodo. In 2015, Fast Company wrote that “Wait But Why is disproving the notion that thoughtful, long-form content and virality are mutually exclusive.” Urban has gained a number of prominent readers as well: authors Sam Harris and Susan Cain, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, TED curator Chris Anderson and Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova. Recently, Urban received a call from Elon Musk, who told Urban he liked his writing and asked Urban if he’d like to interview him and write about his companies. Urban accepted, and spent the next six months writing a thorough blog series that Vox’s David Roberts called “the meatiest, most fascinating, most satisfying posts I’ve read in ages.” Since then, Urban’s relationship with Musk has continued: Musk invited him to host SpaceX’s launch webcast, solicited Urban’s input and slide illustrations in a talk he did at the December 2015 Climate Change Conference in Paris, and recently granted him early access to information about SpaceX's interplanetary transport system for use in a post on Wait But Why.   In This Interview, Tim Urban and I Discuss... The Wolf Parable His blog, Wait But Why The image of the rational mind being trapped inside with an animal How it would be easier if we were just the "animal" How procrastination works: a metaphor Rational decision maker vs the Instant gratification monkey Who has control of the wheel The one thing that the monkey is terrified of: the panic monster Creating your own panic monster by setting external deadlines Which is the alpha character? Chronic procrastinators That when there are no deadlines, you don't really see procrastination happening - and with big life things, this can be very destructive Icky daunting tasks That a building is just a bunch of bricks A book is just a bunch of individual pages  The glorious, large achievement is just a bunch of small, mundane tasks combined The danger of making the bricks too big The importance of keeping promises to ourselves and seeing that track record The power of intentionally starting the day with little wins over the monkey to shift the power dynamic a bit That little steps taken in the right direction gets you there The impact of a habit over time The dark playground vs the dark woods The air is filled with guilt and self-loathing, you're miserable while you're there, rational decision maker asking whyyyy?? The happy playground on the other side of the dark woods The various rides in the dark playground    Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The reason that walking around the block or making your bed is important, it's not going to get you in shape. What it will do is it sends a really important message to your brain. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth.

If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Tim Urban urban tim has become one of the internet's most popular writers with wry stick figure illustrations and occasionally epic prose on everything from procrastination to artificial intelligence urban's blog wait but why has garnered millions of unique page views thousands of patrons and many famous fans his recent ted talk has been watched almost 15 million times.

Tim's articles have been regularly republished on sites like Quartz, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, Business Insider, and Gizmodo. Tim was recently invited by Elon Musk to host SpaceX's launch webcast and was granted early access to information about SpaceX's interplanetary transport system. If you're getting value out of this show, please go to oneufeed.net slash support and make a donation. This will ensure that all 185 episodes that are in the archive will remain free and that the show is here for other people who need it. Some other ways that you can support us is if you're interested in the book

that we're discussing on today's episode, go to oneufeed.net and find the episode that we're talking about. There will be links to all of the author's books. And if you buy them through there, it's the same price to you, but we get a small amount. Also, you can go to oneufeed.net slash book.

And I have a reading list there. Oneufeed.net slash shop. and you can buy t-shirts, mugs, and other things. And finally, OneYouFeed.net Facebook, which is where our Facebook group is, and you can interact with other listeners of the show and get support in feeding your good wolf. Thanks again for listening. And here's the interview with Tim Urban. Hi, Tim. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I am really happy to have you on your blog. Wait, but why is one of my favorites. And I had a great time preparing for this interview. So I'm looking forward to getting into and exploring all that. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather

who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I like that. That's a much more poetic way of talking about what I write about a lot, which is that there's like truly an internal battle going on inside every person. It goes on in us in our

own way. The battle is always kind of the same two characters. One is this higher consciousness, this kind of higher center of rationality and logic and reasonability and high-minded emotions that no other animal can experience or no other animal has, then there's the fact that that higher center of consciousness is stuck inside of a primitive biological animal who cares about animal survival only. And humans, that animal survival instinct is usually tied into our tribal past. And so the animal wants to fit in in a powerful tribe, along with other things like wants to eat as many calories as possible and wants to conserve energy as much as possible.

So you kind of have this kind of Einstein-style higher consciousness kind of dealing with the animal all the time. And again, that comes out in different ways for all of us. Some of us, it makes us procrastinate. And for some of us, it makes us very socially anxious. Some of us, it makes us envious or greedy, or we succumb to groupthink, and we lose our ability to think independently, even though the rational consciousness in us is so great at thinking independently. But it gets overpowered

by this animal that just wants to say the right thing and think the right thing. So I think that most of the human struggles that we go through individually, and probably that we go through as a species, kind of come down to this battle between these wolves. And anytime I'm writing about human psychology or something that's hard for people or whatever, when I'm thinking about this issue, I almost inevitably end up back at these two wolves. And here we are again. This is just another version of the same battle. Yeah, absolutely. That is a core theme that runs through all of your work is that higher self versus the animal self. And I love the way that you talk about the rational mind being trapped

inside the body with an animal, and that these two things have to coexist. And I love that idea that if we were one or the other, it would be so much simpler. But we're not. We're both. And that's what makes things so challenging. If we were just an animal, we'd be so happy. We'd be, you know, just eating an apple and just sitting around and looking at the trees and everything would be great. If we were just either one of these characters on its own, we'd be happy. It would be simple. But it's almost as if evolution decided to create this rational center of consciousness. And its plan, obviously, logically, would be to upload something like that to the cloud or to a kind of synthetic body because it goes along with something like that.

That's what would make sense for it. But it hasn't done that part yet. It hasn't figured out the uploading part yet. It's just as a temporary hack. It's using kind of like a biological primate body as a vessel for it. kind of like a biological primate body as a vessel for it. And while we're in this transition period, we unfortunately have been born into the transition period. And we are sitting here now dealing with the fact that we are both of these things at the same time. This leads us to one of the things that you're probably best known for, which is your post and your subsequent TED talk on procrastination. And the way that you describe this, the way you describe how procrastination

works is so great. And it gets exactly to this. So could you kind of give the listeners a brief walkthrough of that idea? There's lots of parts to it. But let's start with the beginning, which is really about having these two things in our head. Yeah, so one form that these two wolves take is the form of rational decision maker in your head, and what I call the instant gratification monkey in your head as well. And to me, we're all actually acting. Sometimes the two wolves is about thinking or about feeling. And in this case, I feel like this is about when it's about acting. feeling and in this case i feel like this is about when it's about acting and it's as if there's like a there's like a wheel uh in your head that drives your actions at any given moment and the rational decision maker is behind the wheel where he should be and making decisions rationally sometimes good time to have fun he drives the wheel so that you'll have fun then sometimes it makes sense to sleep uh or do something um productive uh get to work it makes it makes sense to sleep or do something productive,

get to work. It makes much more sense to get to work. And that's great. But then this Instagramification monkey's in there, who's also very powerful and who has different ideas of what to do. What the Instagramification monkey wants to do is at all times, no matter what's going on, monkey wants to do is at all times, no matter what's going on, wants to do something easier, fun, period. Uh, you know, he never thinks it makes sense to work and he wants to maximize, you know, the ease and pleasure of the current moment at all times. So when you're struggling with procrastination, when you're one part of you saying, Ooh, it's a really good time to work. I should definitely, definitely sit around and work right now and then some other part of you just opens the internet uh and opens up a different screen than you were planning to and starts doing something that's not productive

and it's kind of odd it's it's it's it's kind of as i said another version of you know when you're when you're like i shouldn't have another cookie but i really just want another cookie or i shouldn't uh it's it's just the It's just the, it's the acting version. It's the work version of that. So what's happening is that the rational decision maker says, let's, let's do some work. And then the monkey just like kind of jumps in and grabs the wheel. And you find yourself like physically you're, you're, you're part of your brain is saying, don't do that. Don't do this. Don't open that window. Don't open this site or whatever it is. Your hand does it anyway.

It's kind of strange. We're kind of crazy people, but that's because we have two characters in our head, not one. The drawings of this are great. So folks, if you're not familiar with it, definitely go to a wait, but why.com and look at this. I'm a big fan of the drawing of the monkey myself. I think a lot of people are because you've now got a stuffed animal for it. But so we've got this situation where, as you said, we're trying to steer the course of our life. And this instant gratification monkey grabs the wheel and decides what's happening. And it's very difficult for us to get control back from the instant gratification monkey. But then you go on to talk about there is one thing that the monkey is terrified of. What's that? Yeah, so I know from is one thing that the monkey is terrified of. What's that?

Yeah, so I know from my own experience, my monkey is very powerful, much more powerful than my rational decision maker. When they're in an argument, the monkey always wins. And so why am I not lying on the street somewhere, just nothing? I realized that it's all about, for me, if there's some kind of other pressure, if there's some kind of external deadline or some kind of serious consequence. Then another character who's usually dormant kind of rages into the scene and that's the panic monster. And the panic monster only wakes up when there's some kind

of like very panicky moment when, oh God, this is due tomorrow. Or you say, oh my, I'm going to be on stage. This is going to be, I want to embarrass myself. I can't believe I haven't worked on something where you totally freak out. Then the monkey's actually scared only of the panic monster. The monkey then runs away. And for just, you know, while that panic is happening, at least the rational decision maker can like grab the wheel and frantically try to get things done, cursing you and cursing himself now because of how little time he's got. Then it's done, and I get things done the very last second. Usually don't miss a deadline. Well, I don't miss a scary deadline.

I might miss a deadline that I've set for myself but a really panicky deadline i don't miss that and then uh the second that's done i you know move on to the next project and say great let's get going and the monkey's back because the panic monster went to sleep monkey kind of you know drop kicks the rational decision maker in the face and just takes the wheel back and that's and i'm and i'm back to back in that land so So this is a pattern that is not a one or two time thing. This has been going on since I was like seven, this pattern. And it's very consistent. And so, you know, if you're me, and I think a lot of other people are probably like this,

you have kind of two options. You can say, okay, well, this is my situation. So I need panic. I need the panic monster to help me all the time. So you build external deadlines and how you figure out how to do that. Always have that in your life. Or you try to actually undergo an internal shift, and it's a little like who you feed, maybe. Everyone's got these two characters. The difference between people who can manage their own work and don't procrastinate, the only difference is that the rational decision maker in their head is the

alpha character and can just say, no, monkey, not now. And the monkey listens. And people have a procrastination problem. The alpha character in the end is the monkey. The monkey's a brat who does not, who just, you know, then the rational decision maker says, no, not now. And the monkey says, shut up and pushes them out of the way and takes the wheel. And so you can try to really work on your psychology to try to change that. And I think that's probably very hard. It's been very hard for me, but I think it probably can be done. People treat procrastination lightly, but this is, it's like anything else. It's like overeating. It's like if someone gets into gambling or something else that they know they

don't want to be doing and they're doing too much of it, you know, it can be a form of addiction in a way. You're kind of, you're stuck in a pattern that can be, you know, very hard to get out of. I go one notch further in the post and the talk and say that, you know, maybe 20% of people in studies tend to be kind of, seem to be chronic procrastinators. And I think those are the people that have the same exact kind of, very kind of deadline-based problem. And they really just can't, they're children about their work. But actually, when I thought about this a lot, and I read a bunch of emails that I got from readers after writing this post about their lives, it hit me that the monkey does most, and the actual the most serious damage, not when you're cramming for some deadline, and oh, man,

I now I'm going to pull an all-nighter. Oh, now this work isn't going to be as good. That's bad, but that's not serious, long-term, deep, regretful damage. And that kind of damage the monkey does in situations when there are no deadlines. Much more daunting things like changing your career or breaking up with someone or working on working on a relationship that, you know, you should be working on or seeing your family more, uh, or working on your health and getting, you know, exercising these big, really critically important things, the kind of things you think about in your deathbed that I think way more than 20% of people procrastinate on because, you know, when there are

no deadlines, you don't really see the procrastination happening. And you don't appear to others to be a procrastinator. But I think there's a lot of people when they really think about their lives, the things that they're regretful about or stressed out about or depressed about or whatever, often amount to the fact that they too are in the hands of the monkey when deadlines aren't part of a situation so it's like they might not be scared of the panic monster right when he arrives in a full panic but it can be that they actually dread his arrival so much that they do the work right away so they don't seem to be but they're still driven in the end by the panic monster. The panic monster for them is still the thing that makes them do

work, even if they don't realize it. And when he's not part of the equation, suddenly that work doesn't happen, just like it doesn't happen for the chronic procrastinator. So that's kind of the extent of the interview with Tim Urban. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow.

I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be, and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready.

Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, Not Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You just talked about a couple of ways to deal with this. One is to sort of create your own panic monster, right? Put all these external deadlines in place. You talked about changing your psychology, and I'll come back to that one in just a second. But you also have some fairly practical ideas too. And one of the things I say on this show a lot is that I think that being overwhelmed and things being

ambiguous are a couple big causes of procrastination. And you talk about how the fact that for a lot of us, when we try and come up with a plan for what we're going to do, we end up making a long list of, you call them, icky, daunting tasks that the monkey can very easily be like, all right, you know what? No way. This is easy. I can procrastinate this. So talk to me a little bit about what you mean by that and how doing better planning helps you to procrastinate less. Part of the problem for procrastinators is how they kind of view big projects, you know, how they frame them in their heads. And so they see if you do a big project, whether it's for work or whether it's, again, something in their in their life, they want to get in shape or whatever it is. And they see it as like this building they have to build.

And they just look at the building and they say, OK, well, I'll do that some other time. Like, obviously, I'm not doing that now. I don't even know how to build and they just look at the building and they say i okay well i'll do that some other time like i obviously i'm not doing that now that's i don't even know how to build a building but i try to say in the post is that you know it's a building is just a bunch of bricks if you look at any great achievement uh you know a great symphony a great book somebody wrote whatever it is it's actually you know one book is just a bunch of individual pages somebody wrote. And if you think about it is I don't have to write a book. I have to write a page 280 times. And I have a year to do it.

So really, I only have to write today. I only have to write a page. And that's it. So I kind of say in the post that I think that, you know, a glorious kind of remarkable achievement is really just a bunch of really unglorious, unremarkable, small achievements from what it looks like from far away. Like when you take a big step back, you're like, whoa, look at this whole achievement. But actually, you zoom up close, it's a bunch of these little bricks that were just, you know, that person that wrote that symphony. Well, on a Wednesday, they really just wrote a few bars of that symphony and maybe did a little bit of orchestrating. Wednesday, they really just wrote a few bars of that symphony and maybe did a little bit of orchestrating. And that's not that impressive on a Wednesday. But it's when you take, you know, the 423 days they worked on a combined and you look, you look at that all together, you say,

oh, my God, I could never do that daunting, amazing achievement. So I think a lot of this is framing and just breaking things down into smaller tasks and getting really competitive with yourself as if you're being like, because you are dealing with a child, the monkey is kind of a child inside of you and saying, look, we just have to do this one brick today. That's it. And then we can have fun. Like you just have to do this one thing, forget the rest of the thing. That's not our problem. We don't do that. You know, you have to kind of be an insane person talking to a child in your head. But if you can kind of do that, I find that that can really help. If I just wake up and I say, I have this only this one thing to

do. Now what a procrastinator does, it often goes along with the same kind of do that, I find that that can really help. If I just wake up and I say, I have this only this one thing to do. Now what a procrastinator does, it often goes along with the same kind of personality that underestimates how much time everything takes. So they'll assign themselves way too much in a day, they'll make the bricks too big, unrealistically big. And then the monkey, you know, you'll feel daunted, which empowers the monkey. And then you end up in some kind of like self fulfilling prophecy where you don't really think you're going to get it done. And then you don't get it done. And then you're self-loathing and then you feel less likely to get it done the next day. And now you feel like you have to get more done the next day because you didn't. And you can get into this bad spiral. So I think it's also really

important to just, even just starting off really small, it's such a self-esteem battle. You talk about which wolf you're feeding. I kind of think that it's when you succeed at overpowering the monkey, even just in a small little thing. If you go to the gym and you've been telling yourself you're going to do that, but you haven't been, and then you do it that day, you come back. I think you find the rest of that day. The rational decision maker has a little bit more mojo and the monkey's a little bit meeker than he normally is. And if you can do it the next day, internally, you start to predict that the rational decision maker is going to win. You say, well, he won two days in a row, I guess, I'm a betting person, I would bet on them again tomorrow.

And it's when you believe that the rational decision maker is going to win. It's usually when he does win. It's when he's failed seven days in a row. And you say, well, let's be honest, you know, deep down, you say, yeah, of course, I'm gonna do it today. But somewhere deep inside of you think, well, but I probably won't, because that's not what's been happening. The monkey gets that information and feels that and that's all the power in the world for the monkey. So, you know, and the worst thing you can do is this what I you know, what you mentioned is icky daunting tasks, say, I'm going to learn this new skill just in general, and it's you don't even know where to start. You don't even know where do I read books? Do I look on YouTube? You know, and so you just

look at that and you say, well, okay, I'm not doing that today because you haven't broken it down into smaller tasks. You just have this one big building in front of you. You don't even know how to build it. And you feel like you're not going to do it. And so the monkey, you're no match for the monkey. The monkey is laughing at the notion that you're going to get that thing done. And so I think that that can definitely help. Yeah, I agree.

I mean, I work with people on this sort of stuff. And everything you said is 100% true in my experience. It's why starting so small is so important, because you can win a very small battle. Like, okay, you know what, you haven't been exercising a year, great. Today, your goal is to walk around the block. And people are like, that's stupid. I'll never get in shape, walk around the block. And I'm like, no, you won't. But that one walking around the block, like you said, it builds your confidence a little bit. You start keeping promises to yourself. And then that gives you more strength. You're able to build from that. And then that changes what you refer to as the storyline, right? And that storyline is that idea like, we don't really take ourselves we when we say we're going to do something because we failed so many times before.

Your storyline is logical. It just looks at the past, it looks at your patterns, and it guesses the story here is this, that I don't actually get anything done when I say I'm going to. And if that becomes your storyline, that's what will end up playing out. So it's this it's this kind of catch 22 where, you know, you need to break that cycle. You know, that's what will end up playing out. So it's this kind of catch-22 where you need to break that cycle. That's the thing. And someone, I forget who it was, said that the first thing they do every morning is they make the bed. Not because they really care about having a maid bed, but because it's a first moment to feel like an adult and to do something that you didn't have to do and that

you did because it's the thing you said you were going to do. And I find kind of my version of that is if I just get up, you know, I work, I'm a writer and I work from home a lot now. And so if I just get up and pull the laptop onto the bed and start sticking around and start maybe, you know, slowly working or whatever, um, I might be in there till 1 p.m. and then just curse myself and get out of bed and shower and like get going. And if I just get up and just get straight in the showers, first thing, just get up and just mindlessly walk. Suddenly it's like, I just, I just, before you know it, I'm kind of like,

okay, wow, it's 941 and I'm sitting here working. It's great. And like, just that, that just like kicks me into, I'm like, you know it, I'm kind of like, okay, wow, it's 9.41 and I'm sitting here working. This is great. And that just kicks me into, I feel like an adult. And then it kind of almost doesn't make sense to procrastinate. It's like if you go off sugar for a while, you stop wanting it. You stop craving it and you stop being addicted to it so much. But on the days when it's 1.50, when I'm first sitting at the computer to start work, But on the days when it's 1.50, when I'm first sitting at the computer to start work, I'm so self-loathing and just so mad at myself that I often will basically get nothing done, even though now I still have a bunch of hours.

I'll work very slowly. My self-esteem is in a terrible place. So the reason that walking around the block or making your bed or getting up and getting in the shower right away is important. You know, it's like you said, it's not going to get you in shape to walk around the block. But what it will do is it sends a really important message to your brain, which is that the monkey didn't want to do that. And the rational decision maker did. And the rational decision maker won because the rational decision maker is in charge. And you come back from that walk and suddenly kind of the power dynamic might feel a little different than it just did, you know, a half hour ago. So starting a day with

a few little wins can go a long way. It can actually really kind of start a chain effect. Hey y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart Series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love.

So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I love that concept of bricks that you talked about and that idea that a book is just a series

of small bricks put together. And one of the things you said that really hit me about that, you said that if you've got an author and somebody who wants to be an author, right, the difference in their day-to-day life isn't that big. 95% of their days are exactly the same. It's just that the author put that one brick in today and the non-author didn't. And that really struck me. It's this idea of it's not about changing everything immediately overnight. And it goes back to what we were just talking about. It's this theme of just these little steps taken, keep going in the right direction. And at the end of that, things can look very different. But trying to go from A to Z almost inevitably fails.

Right. And when you're an author that actually writes books, you know this little secret. But when you're not, when you always wanted to write your book, and you've talked about it forever, I'm going to write a book. I'm going to write it before work every day. I'm going to write a little. I'm going to write it. Whatever it is, you have this myth in your head that the successful author just simply has some power that you don't have.

They say, oh my, I don't know how they could ever do that. They wrote an entire book. I could never actually do that. Because they see it as a full book. They say, oh my, I don't know how they could ever do that. They wrote an entire book. I just, I could never actually do that because they see it as a full book. They're looking at a big building when really it's 285 bricks. Each brick is one page of writing, or maybe it's 700 bricks and each brick is just a paragraph. And so if you think about a brick as a paragraph, say, you, say there's two people and the first person wants to write that book and just on that Monday doesn't do anything and Tuesday doesn't do anything and just doesn't quite manage to start like most of us. And then the second person on that Monday, they write two paragraphs before work. On Tuesday, as they're lying in bed at night, they write another paragraph.

On Wednesday, they do nothing. On Thursday, they have a little afternoon writing session, and they write four paragraphs. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, they do nothing. Then on Monday, after work, they write four more paragraphs. On Tuesday, they write one. So if you look at the difference between the two people's days, they're almost always the same. Some days, they're identical. And the other days we're talking about like a 30 minute difference, like 95 plus percent of the time, they're the same exact person. But then a year later, person A has gotten nothing like they always have. And person B has a finished manuscript that they can send in. And maybe it's published a year later, changes their entire life.

And that's the difference. And the difference is not 24-7, they're just different people. The difference is between 6.30 and 7 in the morning, a few days a week, they're doing something different. Maybe the other person's awake and they're just doing a crossword puzzle in that time, whatever it is. I mean, this is so similar and yet the differences are everything so that's when i look at someone you say oh this person was prolific uh how did this person do it look this person wrote you know 10 great novels in their life and i'm thinking like that person as far as you know was like you know basically doing nothing most of the time and uh and just had a habit a good habit that they developed of, they wrote for a couple hours in the morning, four days a week. I mean, something can be as simple as that, that can

turn into a prolific writer in history. I mean, and so, so you think of it that way, I think it just, it's very inspiring to a procrastinator to think, you know, I, okay, I can do this. You remind yourself that like, no one has magic powers. It's a different version of how we think that people have expertise that we could never ever have. You know, they just, well, I could never, you know, again, I'll keep using the book example. I can never write that book where I could never do a talk on this subject, or I could never get this job and learn to do that because I didn't get the degree. I don't have this. I just don't, I literally lack this forever, lack this knowledge that this kind of person has.

And that's just not true also. Everyone is kind of full of shit. Everyone is learning on the job. Everyone feels like a fraud a little bit. It feels like they don't belong in the company they're in. And when you kind of realize that as well, it's just you kind of it's this myth of everything is more daunting and more impossible, seeming it harder than it actually is. And I think that that's a big brick kind of concept can really help, I think, get you out of that kind of myth. Absolutely. So the last part about procrastination I want to hit, because when I

read it, I just was like, I'd never been able to find the words for it, but it's the dark playground. So explain to me what the dark playground is. Everyone knows what the dark playground is. And some people know it way, way better than what it is is, um, you know, it's that it's that moment when your rational decision maker has decided to work, you know, it's a perfect time to get some work done. It's the early afternoon. If you get four more hours of work done today, you'll feel great tonight.

You'll have a great weekend. And if you don't, you're going to have to work over the weekend and you're going to feel stressed. You're going to be really upset with yourself and you won't have as much fun tonight. And there's not anything else really good to be doing in the next four hours. It just makes every sense in the world to just put your head down and get, get four hours of work done. And yet there you are not working. Okay. And hours pass one hour, two hours, and you know, you're not desperate to get it done. You're just

doing something else. And, and where you are in that moment is the dark playground. And it's, it's kind of a place where leisure activities and fun things happen at times when they're not supposed to be happening. And the reason it's a dark playground and not a fun playground is that, you know, I say that the air is filled with guilt and dread and anxiety and self-loathing and all these very familiar procrastination, you know, feelings. very familiar procrastination, you know, feelings. And so, you know, the fun isn't actually fun. It's, you're miserable when you're there. And, you know, even if part of you is like laughing at a meme you're looking at, you know, a bigger part of you underneath this just has this head in its hand saying, why am I doing this right now? And it's a very, very specific kind of

self-loathing. It's not a good feeling. And it illuminates the true kind of irrationality of procrastination in that you'd be happier right now if you were working. You'd actually feel like, okay, good, I'm getting this done. Like, you know, it's hard. It's not fun to work. But you're not having fun either way. And now you're ruining like real fun later. And I always say that if you can just you know get the work done which

i kind of call like the you know the dark woods if you can kind of just go through those dark woods instead of sitting around the dark playground unlike the dark playground which has no good end in sight it's just you continue to be there or you then have to you know scramble the work later and ruin your your time. If you just power through those dark words and get that four hours of work done, there's such a happy playground on the other side. And it's the best feeling, which is well-earned leisure time. It's when you're now, you know, you're at a movie that night or you're out with friends that night, or the next day you wake up and you go to brunch and you have nothing to do that weekend because you just got your stuff done

the day before, whatever the circumstances. It's the happy playground. It feels great. It's just you can be present. Your mind is present. You don't think I should be doing something. I should. Why didn't I?

It was just, you know, it's so it's so incredibly logical. That's where the rational decision maker is. Not that he wants to work all the time. He loves leisure time when it's when it makes sense. So he's pulling his hair out saying, why did we do it this way? And when you're in the dark playground, he's just sitting there thinking, I can't, why are we here? This is such a valuable time right now that we're,

and the monkey, of course, is just dancing around, running around playing, because he's thinking, I want to maximize this minute's fun. I want this minute to be more fun than as much fun as it could be. And right now, I guess my options are, I'm going to do something fun on the internet or I'm going to go, you know, whatever. So that's kind of the craziest place that the procrastinator is at the dark playground. And you know, I'm there all the time. And I know a lot of other people are too absolutely i think a lot of social media time is is in the dark playground and i've spent a lot of dark playground time playing solitaire it's amazing that that game can it's just it's like

don't even devil's work it's like in the dark playground there's a bunch of rides and solitaire is like the premier ride is there is nothing um more self-loathing than when you should be working you know it and you're behind and you're you're or you're late for something and you're um and you're playing of all things solitaire i know i've only had it up 400 hours of solitaire it's just it is the most self-loathing activity a human can possibly do i agree 100 i'm glad someone else shares that feeling with me then you win solitaire you know It's just, it is the most self-loathing activity a human can possibly do. I agree 100%. I'm glad someone else shares that feeling with me. Then you win solitaire.

You know, you win, and you're just looking with no joy at the screen. None. Like, the cards fall. And you click deal again. Yeah. It is a joyless. Oh, okay. Yeah, I know.

I know. It's a terrible thing. All right. Well, Tim, we're going to wrap up part one of this. So thank you for coming on, and listeners, we'll be back with part two. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support.